On Monday 11 November 2013 Jeanette Winterson was interviewed by Andrew Marr on Radio 4’s Start the Week programme. She spoke about a kind of zombie-dom which I think we’re encouraged to settle into once we’re done with the bother of learning stuff and trying things out. This is probably compounded by the requirements of the workplace, and of the market too — it’s really much less bother when people both produce and consume precisely as they’re told to. Luckily people are glorious and difficult:
Andrew Marr: Would you say that a good writer has to be hard on themselves?
Jeanette Winterson: Oh always, you can’t be self indulgent. You always have to believe either that something is wrong or something is missing and always of course that you could have done it better. It’s about answering to conscience but it’s also about keeping perpetually alive and not dying before you are dead. There are a lot of people walking around now who are in fact dead although they appear to be alive.
Andrew Marr: Because they’re not conscious of being alive, the extraordinary lucky chance of being alive.
Jeanette Winterson: There’s no consciousness, no, and I think in creative work it’s always [about] trying to keep us conscious and at a high level so that this strange rag bag of being, this human being that appears to die, whether there’s an afterlife or not we don’t know, but consciousness seems to be something we all strive for.
Andrew Marr: Look around and pay attention in short.
Jeanette Winterson: And I wish we could drag Michael Gove in here, really, and stop this utilitarian aspect of eduction. And just say let’s have an education which is not about utility, which is about allowing people to be human beings in all their glory and difficulty. Otherwise we’re back with Engels, aren’t we? Looking round at the slums of Manchester and saying this is what happens when men regard each other only as useful objects.
Jeanette Winterson in conversation with Andrew Marr – Start the Week, Radio 4, Mon, 11 Nov 2013
